What Thoughts May Come

The rocks crumbling underfoot went unnoticed next to the burning sun above. The air was dry, and quickly blew all moisture from Majnún’s skin, leaving a brief tingle as the evaporation cooled his arms. There was hardly a cloud to see, and on the ground was only cactus and rough bushes. Likely snakes and scorpions hid all around, but even they avoided the heat of the day. Hiking the desert at midday takes a special kind of madness — or a very special reason.

The next hill remained forever distant from Majnún’s laboring feet. Dust, the color of calfskin, stretched in all directions, with only a few sprays of green in the form of spiny plants. Even breathing took the moisture from one’s lungs, so Majnún drank constantly. His bottle of water grew lighter with every step.

Somewhere in all this chaparral lived a fair maiden — a princess of great reknown. He trekked to find her, and to present his gift of love, that she might favor him with a glance. It was said her gaze could heal wounds, and the shape of her face granted wishes. Certainly the stories he had heard in California promised nothing less. Could it be true? Had he found one who would touch his heart and leave in its place a thing of beauty and light? One foot following the other, he continued on his way to find out.

Even her name was a mystery. A ravishing women from the East, named after a famous nom de plume of a century ago. They say that, in public circles where many came to admire and capture her beauty, she used other names and told other tales. This only heightened the mystery of that precious being, who even now pulled at Majnún’s heart like a magnet deep in the Earth. Although the sun fell dim and blood red in the west, and his bottle carried less than a trickle, he knew the time was drawing near when he would find refreshment simply by her words, “I am here.”

The creatures of the desert regarded the wanderer in silent amusement. No fools for love, they. There is a wisdom in saving the heart, and keeping one’s focus on matters of food and shelter. But the lover who catches a glimpse of his hope — his beloved — cares nothing for the laws that govern ordinary lives. He goes from shelter to rain, from surfeit to famine, just to hear her name one last time. He is a creature foreign to the world of being. How well the Master relates:

Love accepteth no existence and wisheth no life: He seeth life in death, and in shame seeketh glory…. Blessed the neck that is caught in His noose, happy the head that falleth on the dust in the pathway of His love.

And dust there was, everywhere; and Majnún with a longing to throw his head — his life blood! — down upon it! to drain away his life in remembrance of her; to prove, by becoming a stain upon the ground, his undying devotion. To a lover, these are the marks of true living and the heights of glory.

But first, to find her — to tread this barren valley of Search on a mare both intemperate and slow. For Majnún recognized that his own being was the steed he rode, and so he willed each leg to chase the other down dusty trails and up crumbling hills. Each step was an insult to his thirst; every moment, a sliver of time pressing into his heart. But since the Master counsels patience, he whispered to each leg, to each cell, to hold back from their madness, until he could watch her smile and feel the dawn of reunion breaking over the dark night of absence.

The awesome cactii, with dusty arms reaching for heaven, said nothing. The rabbits here and there gave no comment. The first stars peeked in the darkness, and twinkled, but remained shy. The brushing of scaly bodies, and sinuous tracks through the dirt, was all that was heard from the snakes. Only the coyote and his plaintive howl seemed to agree that life without a sun is not enough. But while his sun had passed beyond the hills, Majnún’s had yet to rise in the East of recognition. Where was she?

Searching high and low, under rocks and behind trees, he looked for her. Everyone he passed, he questioned; every broken leaf he pondered for signs of her passing. As the Master told:

In every face, he seeketh the beauty of the Friend; in every country he looketh for the Beloved. He joineth every company, and seeketh fellowship with every soul, that haply in some mind he may uncover the secret of the Friend, or in some face he may behold the beauty of the Loved One.

But he met so few on the trail, and of her there were only hints and stories. He pursued them all, looking for whatever clue might lead to her palace. In the end, he even fell down on the dust, and begin sifting its grains, in case she had made the ground her home.

One must judge of search by the standard of the Majnun of Love. It is related that one day they came upon Majnun sifting the dust, and his tears flowing down. They said, “What doest thou?” He said, “I seek for Layli.” They cried, “Alas for thee! Layli is of pure spirit, and thou seekest her in the dust!” He said, “I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her.”

Where could she be? The hapless wanderer was out of food, out of water. He lived now on the energy of his own tissues. He consumed himself like a candle to give forth a weak flame in the night — his only guide. And like the candle, he wept hot tears streaking his face, and guttered whenever biting winds rose from the north. Almost without hope he struggled on, and lived for the one thought that perhaps she was near. His state recalled the Master’s tale:

From the rule of love, his heart was empty of patience, and his body weary of his spirit; he reckoned life without her as a mockery, and time consumed him away. How many a day he found no rest in longing for her; how many a night the pain of her kept him from sleep; his body was worn to a sigh, his heart’s wound had turned him to a cry of sorrow.

When shall it end? Feet numbed from travel, a heart weighing like stone, Majnún pushed ahead. Everything he’d brought fell to his side as he gave up the final impediments. A trail of worthless belongings littered the trail, marking his passage by tokens that offered no solace. Soon even memories were swept away, knowledge — the fragments of his very being. Existence itself he sloughed off, to be replaced by the sole image of his beloved.

Nor shall the seeker reach his goal unless he sacrifice all things. That is, whatever he hath seen, and heard, and understood, all must he set at naught, that he may enter the realm of the spirit, which is the City of God.

How does one follow the track of a ghost? The weary one became invisible to his own eyes, and so perhaps the story must end here. But he’d yet to find the aim of his longing, and the strength of his yearning still sparked the air and thrilled the atoms by its vibration. Everywhere he went he brought life, which he gave freely because he himself sought death. Or rather, he thirsted for the death of absence, to taste the draught of reunion. “He had given a thousand lives for one taste of the cup of her presence…”

A thing of pure spirit, he drifted over the desert sands. The animals were still quiet; the bunnies flopped their ears, and paused to muse the secrets of a blade of grass. What the snakes knew they kept to the trails, and wrote only these lines in their gliding calligraphy:

Love's a stranger to earth and heaven too;  
In him are lunacies seventy-and-two.

Some day, fate promises, the aching bellies will reach to the table of bounty, and the parched tongues taste from the meads of delight; the aching travelers will soak in the ocean of nearness, and besotted poets drown their misery in the wine of union. But when shall these things be?

In answer to this, one must recall His words to mind, where He speaks of the life of the soul, and the sweet death of the seeker who vanishes, to enter the heaven of his Goal:

[Love] yieldeth no remedy but death, he walketh not save in the valley of the shadow; yet sweeter than honey is his venom on the lover’s lips, and fairer his destruction in the seeker’s eyes than a hundred thousand lives….

For the head raised up in the love of God will certainly fall by the sword, and the life that is kindled with longing will surely be sacrificed, and the heart which remembereth the Loved One will surely brim with blood. How well is it said:

  Live free of love, for its very peace is anguish;  
  Its beginning is pain, its end is death.

Peace be upon him who followeth the Right Path!

I don’t remember how we came to be in that place, gathered beneath that magnificent tree, its long branches touching the sky. All of us were huddled together, though I don’t know how. Nothing makes sense when I think about it. But I do know we were dry, safe, and secure, wherever we were — and we were also thirsty.

Most of us did not recognize the desire as thirst. It was just a vague burning that kept getting worse. Some tried everything to distract themselves from it. We yearned and writhed, but no solace came. We spoke to each other about it, but did not properly understood what it was. We only knew that something was not as it should be, somehow. Peace eluded us.

Outside the tree it was raining. Everyone could see that, could hear it. What the rain meant, we did not know. Since very few had ever ventured out from under the tree, we took it to be another of the unaccountable details of life. Stories even built up about the rain and what it might be. It was said to strip the flesh from a man’s back, or to induce insanity. Some who went into it never came back. Since we knew that the tree offered safety and security, most of us remained there. We kept to telling each other stories.

At some point a questionable character went off into the rain. He came back claiming it was refreshing, and had relieved the parching thirst of his tongue. He couldn’t drink much, but he was obviously tantalized. He tried to encourage some of us to follow him out, but we couldn’t imagine leaving the tree. I don’t even remember what we did there, though I recall not wanting to leave.

The adventurer did not give up, however. He went out again, for a long while. When he came back, he held something that looked like a gourd. We could also tell, from his eyes, that his thirst was gone. He had found something we needed! Whatever could alleviate our terrible hunger was worth considering. And thus, he told us a strange tale.

The rain, he claimed, was the very thing we needed. It surrounded us always, pouring bounty from the clouds. However, as prodigious as it was, catching it was not easy. Holding one’s mouth to the sky gave a little comfort, but not much. Then he told about the science of the cup, and how it allowed one — given patience — to slowly gather the waters into one place, from which they could be drunk. Even more, it permitted the waters to be carried out of the rain: for example, under the tree. This was how I first tasted what I had been longing for.

He held out the cup for each of us, but we only took a sip. There was not enough for all, and certainly not enough to calm our thirst. If anything, it made us feel worse, the burning more intense. He ran out and back again several times, but the thirst was great and his vessel small in comparison.

He told us we would each have to fashion a cup, and holding them to the sky, walk out from under the tree. We would have to stand in the rain a while, letting the waters fill our cup, and then we could drink, and continue repeating until satisfied. If our thirst returned, we could do the same thing to satisfy it again. The man had offered us a way out of misery.

There were still many under the tree who refused to try, however, not believing the water meant anything — or calling it poison. We tried to tell them, but they questioned the necessity of the cup. So crude and awkward, after all, and the water so formless and transparent. It didn’t make sense how important they were, or the connection between the two.

So, these days I venture out from the tree of knowledge by myself, or with a few others, and hold the cup of my religious discipline to the sky, awaiting the bounty of heaven’s grace to fill my cup. When I drink, thirst is allayed and I see the reason for the thirst, the water, and the cup to hold it. They all exist to bring us together, so that my soul comes out from the tree, and looks up to contemplate the heavens always above me. What strange creatures there; what amazing patterns in the clouds…

This, I think, is the connection between the varying forms of religion, and the ineffable, formless Mystery it conceals.

I remember there was dark everywhere — dark and smoke. The smoke burned at the base of my nose, inside, where one feels the air as he breathes in deeply. It stung, and reminded me that I was somewhere I usually don’t find myself.

I came only to watch him play. He’d traveled three thousand miles from the East Coast, playing at various bars and theaters. This bar happened to be on his route because it was an attraction in San Francisco. I felt that perhaps a concert hall might be more appropriate for an accomplished pianist, but he preferred the “earthy” quality of places of relaxation like this. Here, amidst the dark and smoke, people opened up their hearts to pour out all that was in them. And while open, the heart is in a suitable condition to receive. You might not think that, with all of the emotional release, there would be enough room for anything else to enter (one pictures a boat trying to float upstream), but the nature of the heart is that it is forever pumping in blood at the same time that it’s pumping it out.

The people seated around me tonight, feasting on a chance to expel their garbage of the day, were at the same time allowing his gentle music to settle into their lives, nestling in places of the heart that are only accessible at times like these. Where there is a lack of the genuine, the real and painful, there is also a lack of true sentiment. Perhaps concert hall feelings are more grand or exalted, but at the same time these are feelings lifted up out of an ambitious soul, and not placed there by the artist who, by placing them, gives a gift of his art to those of us without a concert hall to go to.

I find that the notes flow more smoothly, that they are mellower in a place like this. One has to concentrate to separate the music from the noise, but this effort yields a certain reward. Where there is only silence and the music, it is too easy for the listener, and sometimes a thing is more pleasurable if a small barrier keeps us from having it all-at-once and immediately. In some aspects of life, people thrive on frustration. It is not a bad thing, but spice.

He continued playing for an hour before taking his first break. Most of the music was contemporary, or well-known classical. The bar was quieter than one might imagine such a place in the middle of the city to be. About eighty people were seated among the two levels, sipping coffee or drinking. Some sat by the bar, and a small crowd danced slowly in an open area near the window. The piano was back from the center, closer to my table on the far side of the window, and the music lifted evenly through the upper-balcony tables. Some sat listening, as I did, wondering some far-away thing, abstracted in a state of deep appreciation. But this was by far the minority reaction. Most seemed to ignore the music, or to let it flow into a nondescript background of chatter and noise. It was strange to hear Chopin played under such circumstances, but that was the desire of the player, and it was good.

He returned to his bench and continued for another hour, playing favorites that attracted attention as well as others I had never heard of before. It wasn’t until ten o’clock that the people began to thin out. Then more time passed, and the people became fewer still. Once there were about thirty or so, he began to play things more and more inappropriate to the venue: Beethoven, Bach — music which made the difference between a bar and the concert hall even more striking. No one complained, however, and he continued on.

The night was slowed by his music, as he drifted further into the fields of the nocturne. It was during this time that I first heard him play Moonlight Sonata, by Beethoven. It was preceded by a long silence – one whole minute — and the expectations of the group were piqued. His eyes remained closed the whole time, and he sat perfectly still, arms drawn in, almost as if in a kind of pain. I found out later that my perception of pain was correct, but his action was not one of defense. He was calling on the muse of broken love, and dreams out of reach. But none of this did I know then as I heard the first chord, gentle, stroking like a lover’s touch beneath a canopy of moonlight. Was there an ocean near the balcony, and the dinner guests now from another era, standing in admiration as the wan lover spoke of his heart’s sickness, speaking to the cure who sat at her table listening with admiring eyes to his serenade?

Then came the first sigh of agony, colored by hope: the lover, don in a black suit with long tails that hung openly over the bench, and the one played for, with her dark braids coiled in a comely fray about her back. She sat spell-bound, frozen in silence by the sincerity of her lover’s tone. He caressed each note into being, playing the gentle harmonies and rhythms, ever-attended by a deepening current of bass. She was plied, opened by the seeking power of his notes. Above, the cold moon was dispassionate, suffused with the fullness of a black night. The clouds had kept the stars away, but she, in her brightness, could not bear to be absent from this rendering of love. Does devotion call the stars into being? Or do we imagine as our gods those things we feel they ought to be, such as sun, moon, planets and stars? Then if these are tokens of the great mysteries, why is not Love herself a goddess? Not ascribed as the virtue of some seething planet, but a true goddess in her own right: fickle, playful, leaving as dead those who would offer her their lives as sacrifices. That is the god our lover played to, unfolding his melody to an accompaniment of inward tears. Such tears have softened hearts of white granite as Love takes her hold and does not let go. What chance do we have, or reason to submit? But somehow, in her girlish charm, she is able to portray death to us as fairer than dear life. Her poison is true favor, and we, Socratic thinkers all, when offered this cup of hemlock, do trade our one life for another we only imagine. No sign of the future life is given, but for evidences of pain and anguish. It is mysterious that her hold is deeper than the mind itself, reaching through the brain to lay cruel hands on a thing as tender as the human heart. And we submit willingly, with smiles on our faces. This is the mystery hidden deep within the mystery.

He continued playing, not as the heaven-struck lover, but as a simple piano-man playing his song, making me see him as the truest lover I had yet known. I looked at the aimless crowds peering through their glass bottoms and yawning — such that from disgust as well as intrigue I turned back to see the woman in braids giggle as the music became more playful. She understood too well, but yet did not understand. Perhaps women cannot know the secret passion of men, how it surges in us like a groaning sea, desperate to cast its burden on some lovely shore of tenderness and warmth. Again my mind singled out the hoarse, throbbing bass, and I felt my attention drawn there though others be distracted by the playful rhythms above. The bass was electric, whispering, strong, subtle and yet patient in a manner that was agony. The damsel’s face remained innocent: did she refuse to realize the menacing tone of that bass? It, below, sent up froth in a mighty wave that pounded on her shore of precious grains. And above, the thoughtful melody separated those grains through kindness and soft-spoken words. Man is both these halves, and though often a woman would have only the one, yet she is doomed to both if she would have a man in her life. Gentle women! You must know the double-mystery, or else find some way to calm the roiling current which stirs always in our breast. I hate to be a man for this at times, but then I realize it is the lens through which I view the world, and without it everything would be blurred and indistinct. It is the dark that pulsates through the left hand, dark and ever-cursed as the side of evil and mischief. But the right hand, honored and a title of trust, is the voice we use to speak where our worlds meet. This is our song: the sound of an anguished lover, fingers on ivory and clutching at the vacant hollow of his flesh. He sings to the woman in braids who can only ever half-understand him.

I could feel the image slipping away as the song reached to its gentle conclusion. The player paused, feeling more silence was necessary, then decided it were best to take another break.

Late into that night, when everyone had left, I asked the man how he had played that song so deeply, and what story there must have been behind it. He smiled, and gazed deeply into my eyes to see if I would understand his answer. He said, in a very simple tone that vastly differed from the rarefaction of my own soul, “If you want to play the Sonata, you need to remember only one thing: that each hand is different. You can’t play them the same as you would play Chops or something simple like that.”

Then he looked even more intensely, and waited a moment. The air drew apart between us, and a curtain lifted to reveal his eyes of penetrating green. He said, with his eyes and with his words, “And remember always that your left hand is the tone of your passion, and the right is what you reveal of that passion. Don’t reveal it all, or you might scare people away, because not everyone can contemplate the passion that dwells in some. But rather mete it out, soft and gently through the right, and those who can hear it will understand.”

With that he closed the piano and stood to walk away. I felt like asking more, but my voice was silent as he continued toward the door. But before leaving he turned, and looked once more with his green mirrors into the depths of my soul. And for a moment, only a moment, I swear that I saw the reflection of a distant woman in braids.

There was a group of us in an observing station, based somewhere on the ocean near the Florida keys. From a satellite above, encircling the Earth somewhere out there in the eternal night of space, there was an image visible on the radar. It was sinewy and long, roughly the shape of a slug, and it twisted around and around like a tornado. At the same time, it was also tracing a roughly elliptical path near one of the islands in the Florida Keys. This path was no more than a mile long, with the object itself possibly a quarter mile tall, and a few hundred feet wide.

Upon closer examination, we found that the object was in fact some kind of vortex, deep black, and it was causing objects to disappear when it touched them. But since the area was pretty much deserted (no one wanted to go near it), there was no real damage being done.

After we set up the observing station, we looked hard into the vortex, and found that a strange, shimmering light was visible. As we looked more intently, we saw that the shape represented an image, visible beyond the vortex. It wasn’t on the other side of the vortex, since there was only water there, and the island, but it was beyond the vortex. After a while, the image became clearer, and we realized in awe that it was a gigantic space station.

At this moment we realized that the vortex was actually a tear in space, and that we were looking into a different part of the galaxy! The space station was enormous, several miles in diameter, and was made of six concentric rings that were fashioned together to make a sphere. The rings themselves were of a dull, gray metal, with tiny lights all along them.

There was a great sense of excitement in the observation station, because we had discovered an alien artifact. There was no sign of life, but it was certainly not something made by humans. So we began to try sending probes through the vortex, to get more information.

The dream continued by skipping time in jumps. A moment later we were several months into the project. Somehow two of our engineers had been caught by the vortex, and carried away into the other dimension. After several days, they were sent back. We never discovered who sent them back, but when they came back they were not the same as before. There were electrical implants in their bodies, as if the tissue had died and the aliens had repaired them. This was my impression, since they were in all other respects healthy. Perhaps falling through the vacuum of space had caused tissue damage, and the aliens had “fixed” the humans and sent them back. The engineers did behave a little strangely afterward, but they continued to work with the observation group.

Our project was highly secret, and no one knew what we were doing. The world at large thought that the vortex was simply a strange atmospheric phenomenon, and that the government “was keeping an eye on it”. Even the government officials didn’t completely believe our story. I guess no one ever came down to check.

One day, several months into the project, there was a high-pitched, whining noise. All of sudden I had that sense that there was another presence among us. One of the men suddenly lurched forward and fell, and then another was struck by something — something invisible. As I stood up to find out what was going on, there was another whine, and then I felt myself hit by something… or someone? And then it was gone. The noise stopped, and the room was silent again.

When we looked around, we guessed that we had been visited by a presence from the alien space station. Maybe there need for physical violence was a fear response, and they thought we might try to attack them? Anyway, several hours after the encounter I found a pair of compact discs. They had handwriting on them, in black marker, listing a series of dates. At first I thought there was only one disc — and so did everyone else — since the second disk was stuck to the first, on the bottom. The top disc was yellowish, and the bottom completely silver. Since the top disc didn’t contain any really interesting information, everyone disregarded it.

Later on, perhaps a few days later, I found the second disc stuck to the first one. This disk did have some interesting details on it. It seemed to be described certain events that would be happening soon in Earth’s future. First there would be war, and pestilence; and then a desolation of the land, and famine; and then the oceans would begin to rise, washing away much of the coastal land mass. Finally, 550 years into the future, a gigantic meteor would circle round the sun, and impact with Earth on its return journey. This would have the result of wiping out all life on the planet.

I realized instantly that the alien civilization was trying to warn us of what would happen in our time. You see, the vortex represented not only a rift in space, but in time as well. Looking out at the space station, were we seeing the future. We were seeing what would be built, somewhere in our galaxy, at sometime in the remote future. And this race of beings had historic knowledge of our destruction, and was trying to warn us.

I immediately rushed to the heads of our government, who were in charge of the observation project, and tried to warn them. But no one would listen to me. Not a soul! They all laughed, and seemed ignorant of the presence of the second disc, and for some bizarre reason would accept that it existed. They merely disclaimed all possibility of horrible things happening in the future, and accused me of being a doom-sayer.

Even the members of my own team thought I had lost a marble or two. I even showed them the second disc, but they acted like they couldn’t see it. As if it didn’t exist! It was there in plain sight, and I could see by the motion of their eyes that they did indeed see it, but they acted as though the fact of its existence would never penetrate their consciousness.

At this point I was in utter despair, because I felt in my gut that the alien message was true. Except it was so far into the future! I would be long dead before the trials began to occur, and at that time who would warn everyone? Would the meteor catch us unawares, because no one was willing to heed the alien’s warning?

And in fact, some of the trials did start happening within my lifetime. The ocean raised by a few inches (though the meteorologists said that it was a temporary phenomenon, and that they would recede again), and the land started to become drier. The governments were daily becoming more agitated with one another, and unemployment was on the rise. It looked like the prophecies were just beginning to become true — and I even had the blueprints for them in my hand! — but no one would listen to me. I was alone in my terrible knowledge of the future.

So I just continued to study the discs, to see if there was anything I could do. But there was not. As just one man, there was no lasting impact I could make on the understanding of those around me.

And so the dream ended, with nothing more than a terrible sense of the future, and of what the alien’s had tried to tell us. I don’t know how it will turn out. I still don’t know.

Lily sat by the sea and clutched her hands tightly to her chest. It was not enough for the peaceful water to extend, endless into the blue horizon: she had to feel it with all her soul, to stretch out and enfold that grand space until she had become what her heart admired.

The sun, as it often does, burned too brightly. She couldn’t stay for very long before its harshness challenged her admiration — though for a moment, exactly because it was a challenge, her spirit girded up, her fine senses multiplied, and in that moment she became more than she was. Her awareness of beauty, of grandeur, glowed in the hot tribulation provoked by a sun warring with her more delicate nature.

At last, as always must be, she was forced to yield and to seek a place beneath the shady cypresses. Yet the chilling Pacific winds are enough to evaporate whatever remaining warmth lies in one. After only a moment it becomes too cool, and one must return to the effusive sun again.

Lily turned her palms upward and counted invisibly the years of her life. She was twenty-six and unmarried. Her mother was worried at the fact, but her father remained unconcerned. Lily herself often thought of how she didn’t have someone, but the actual fact of being unmarried was unimportant. To her mother, it was a question of having a loose end to take care of; that is, of her daughter’s progressing from a lesser state to a greater one; while for Lily the emphasis lay on him, and the lonesome fact that he was taking his sweet time in finding her.

Whether she blamed him for the delay or herself would have fueled quite an argument. Always the men she met were too shallow, too idiotic, or too stereotypical. She herself was unchanging — relatively speaking – so that certainly the fault must lie with them. And whomever, from all that plethora of manhood in the world she was destined to marry, had so far kept himself absent from the interviews. So it must be him that was at fault.

To Lily’s mother, it was her. She was too picky, too meddlesome, too unreachable. Every time he would come to dinner, she would depart, leaving only her body behind to carry on a conventional dialog with the stranger. And since Lily’s looks were not about to win her a place at stardom, surely some attention must be paid to the guest, or else how could he possibly be interested?

Thus the mother dwelled on the marriage, and the daughter on the man. At the moment neither was present, indicating that they were both dealing in fantasies. If only her mother could see how wrong they were, and if only she would realize that time was running out! The availability of single, desirable men was dwindling with each year, revealing more and more acutely why those who were still single are.

Agghh! Let us brush away these thoughts, Lily said to herself. They destroy the view.

And, in being frank with herself, she continued: I am like those fish, submersed in the unchanging monotony of their life. And even if I dare the chance to leap out to catch a glimpse of sun, I am only bound to fall back into the same old ways again. Then it must be that he is a friend who will make the waters warm for me, tell me tales of the sun, and encourage us to jump together, and often. It will still be the same life and the same boredom — as far as the facts of living go — but it will at least have been ameliorated to something quite pleasant, almost like the flying of those birds I envy for their romps in heaven. This will become my access to the joys my heart has longed for, and the raptures my soul has pined for, but never gained.

She sighed in all the luxury of self — pity as she considered the many oceans of time that lay between her and her future beloved. Given all the possibilities of life, he must be out there, only it required exhausting them one by one, bowing before chance and fortune, praying that perhaps fate might assume a more controlling role.

Her fill of despair suddenly became too tiresome, and she stood up to admire the raw simplicity of the land. The ancient rocks seemed as though yesterday had been a thousand years ago. The blanket of sea spread between her and them rolled and thrashed. Small fish couldn’t help but be caught up in the rigorous froth. Atop one rock was a lone cypress: calm within calm: a photograph amidst a fantastic image, yet it was actually there. The contrast between its thoughtful repose, and the thoughtless violence of the sea, trapped Lily between the essential forces of two opposing worlds. On the one hand, the established order of marriage and all that it implied, and on the other, the pure fantasy of exclusive passion: a love to burn all life’s trivialities to ash, and sweep them aside in a breathless glance. Such a feeling is, in a manner like the sea, heedless of all future and consequence. Let come tomorrow what may.

And then there were the rocks, in their impasse of bearing, forbidding any fluidity within the established rules of life. Reckless passion cannot but fail; forethought, unregarded, cannot but lead one into utter ruin. Why were social laws and mores brought into being but to protect one from the reckless excesses of youth? And though all the waters turned and boiled, yet the essential grayness of the rocks remained unchanged.

Lily felt this about her mother’s ideas of marriage. Such a final thing left to mere decision making! “Is there enough money to support you?” “Will he raise the children well?” “Is so-and-so connected to good influences?” Never mind the tender heart that must endure the constant comings and goings of the same face and the same attitudes. To Lily’s mind, if the hearts were not in every way connected, none of these external considerations mattered at all. A poorly built ship, despite the best of weather, cannot float.

Yet then there was time. It was moving fast. Already two decades of single living seen and gone. Could either mother or daughter endure another two?

The sun had turned another quarter through the sky. Four hours of considering when the change would come. But who knew? Better to meet as many people as possible, as soon as possible, than to sit here on a dune and contemplate the impossible!

Lily drew her hands up to her cheeks. They were dry and exceedingly hot. The sun had made her knees pink, and her eyelids warm. It was very much past the time when she should move on.

Downtown Carmel has a charm which survives all the rampant outrages of materiality. Thus, for every irreverent factory meant to pass money from the hands of the tourists into that of some far-away company, there were at least two more that expressed the genuine spirit of the town: people seeking to bring art to public attention, restaurants specializing in old family recipes, bookstores carrying books that most people hadn’t heard of. All of this thriving spirit surfaced through the morass of bright colors and expensive clothing that could be witnessed everywhere else.

Amidst this struggle walked Lily. Her head was down, contemplating the stone pebbles that lay on the sidewalk. To the left she could hear a violinist playing for bills, and to the right, cars of every model and color, arrayed in regular parade order — moving slowly, so as not to miss the beauty of the town. In this way Lily became both observer and observed. The tourists and the locals in the cars admired her bent head, and her soft, straight hair that played carelessly in the wind. She in turn regarded them in the corners of her eyes, observing their sleek, smooth blackness, and the occasional red streak of a Ferrari. The cars acted almost as a kind of transportation mechanism, carrying luxuriant overtones of wealth and prosperity from one end of the town to the other. It was all nothing more than cars, people and shops, but somehow it felt like so much more, as if unnumbered possibilities were waiting just below the surface for only the right person to bring them into the light.

Such was the buoyant health of the town, bubbling and effervescent, that it swept its visitors from end to front and back again. Lily welcomed the insistent good cheer as a respite from her own brooding, and allowed herself to be carried along on its currents.

At one point, the energies flow together in front of a small coffee-shop, at the base of a T-intersection. In one direction the road heads back to Route 1, the old Pacific Highway, connecting the southern part of Monterey Bay with its northern counterpart, Santa Cruz. (Whatever might be lacking in the way of adventuresome spirit in Carmel, by the way, was certain to be found in Santa Cruz, but that is a different story altogether…). In the other direction the road curves around to the coast, and heads back down into Big Sur and Pacific Heights. That way lies beauty…

Lily ordered a cappuccino and sat to watch the crowds pass. How many people! A seething mass of color and cloth, and provocative bits of flesh showing here and there — a veritable feast for the viewing. Yet which among them was he? The tall, lonesome stranger stooping down to rescue a flower from a tangle of leaves? Too tragic. The stylish gentleman, hands in his pockets, moving steadily along to his next engagement? Too predictable. Or maybe the one across the street, dark hair and green eyes, stealing a glance every now and then whenever she turned away? Maybe just too shy.

Lily cataloged and processed every possible and impossible, probable and all-too-daring encounter. Where no hope existed, she registered it calmly and firmly, accepting this as the fate of life. But then there was he with the deep-set eyes, jewels in a face unknown… He was walking now down his side of the street, and turning to cross at the light. Now he was crossing. Now he was moving slowly towards her domain…

All of these things she reflected on afterwards. As usual, such events arrived in the memory at a terrifying blur, and only after long days are they clarified and separated. It is almost like a pasteurizing of memory, a converting of the pure milk of experience into something more agreeable to the palate. So it was with the mystery stranger who never reappeared. In that moment of unreasoning hope she had leapt across the distance of space that separated them, and seen far into his mystery eyes that seemed to signal to her from some dark and mysterious place. But as he crossed to the other side, and became momentarily obscured by a corner of the building (her vantage point was recessed in a courtyard, inset within a much larger building), the moment turned into minutes, and then many, and then many, many more. She had intended to spend the rest of the afternoon immersed in thought, but now she was oppressed by the obdurate length of that interminable moment. If only what we call a “moment” were to coincide with the briefest divisions of time, nothing painful would ever last for very long. But a true moment is independent of duration, albeit time plays a necessary role.

However, lest it be imagined that the unknown stranger really meant so much, consider instead that he represented, in that one exaggerated moment, every undiscovered lover who might have been. He thus took on the mythical stature of the same nameless figure who had shared with her her dream-filled afternoons. And so he had an image now, even if arbitrary: he was aloof, regardless of the world’s trivial details, and set apart from our society of madness and lack of feeling. Where had he gone to, this one whose name I may never know? Lily waited out the moment until the sun, ripening into a dusky vermilion, prodded her home with its magic stare.

Imagine those heavy feet that dragged: those of a human being who had realized the ugly fate of having to long for another human being. It was not enough to be single, alone and free. The machinations of Fate work ever to keep us from peace.

Lily did not weep, although it was in her heart to do so. Somehow it seemed that the god upon whom our pity calls was not with her that evening, and hence no reason to invoke him. Thus she remained quiet and stunned — pained to the quick by the realization that what she had been longing for so dearly in her life had just passed, corporeally, before her very own eyes.

Lily ended the day in her bedroom, looking out over a row of palm trees that brushed the sky. Like the stars above, her hope grew with the evening, until the whole of her thoughts was illuminated with the brightness of future days.

The moths outside Lily’s window, too, were rapt in devotion. Their object, however, was simply the light of an electric bulb, buzzing at sub-audible levels in the otherwise quiet stillness of the evening. God had created them to direct their flight towards the very herald of the night, the moon himself, but now, due to the contrivances of men, this passionate moth found himself having arrived at a place very distant from his goal.

And he will never leave, for he has become entranced in this electric, dazing glare, longing only to immolate himself in a final act of incontestable fidelity. Such noble desires wasted on a simple, eighty-watt bulb! His God-given impulses had become directed towards a petty thing, yet he himself was content to remain there. How strange.

Our own unquenchable thirst for completion is perhaps an indication that although we seek our beloved in this world, perhaps the true “other” is found elsewhere. That we have been created with a deep-seated longing is undeniable — even the most thoughtless and empty-hearted among us seek something to occupy their days. The proof is that we all are athirst: implying a remedy, and that we all are in search of: implying a goal.

Lily’s heart carried on the meditation, though her mind was occupied with more trivial things (who she’d seen in town, the graduate school she wanted to go to, the paintings she wanted to buy…). But as the night came she permitted herself to relax into the thoughts that come most easily: those lead us into sleep. Now and then the images played together and turned, until they unified at last into an indistinguishable blaze of color — and finally blackness.

Asleep, perhaps our souls, like Lily’s, carry on this great question of why we live and what we live for. Perhaps we feel the effort in our muscles when we wake, or the lingering of the question — but we shrug it off and begin the day anyway. Yet does it all start and end so easily? Do days and nights simply alternate like footsteps, heading us constantly toward some inevitable, final moment? Aren’t we bound to ask ourselves whether the goals we’ve set to achieve are really worth our while, and whether they can actually fulfill us at all?

Perhaps one human being can fulfill another. I have yet to see. The stimulating pain of not having someone, or something, to fill the space is real enough. Perhaps this signifies that the intended beloved is real enough as well.

And then the sun comes. Lily wakes and another day begins. Maybe he is a green-eyed stranger — that one to fill her soul — or an unseen deity, never to be seen or comprehended. Let the tormented ask that question; let them waste their time in idle thought. After all, it’s the part of the living to live, rather than debate what living is all about.